WND's Farah Tells Lies In Order to Claim Obama Is 'Anti-Semitic'Topic: WorldNetDaily

WorldNetDaily editor Joseph Farah is a liar; it's whathedoes. So it's no surprise that Farah's March 29 WND column attacking President Obama over his purported stance on Israel is yet another pack of lies.

The column begins with an ominous-sounding editor's note: "Joseph Farah wrote this column before the Obama administration betrayed Israel in the most shocking way by revealing classified information about its nuclear program." In fact, as Media Matters documents, the declassifed 1987 document in question was released only after the Department of Defense spent years fighting its release -- due to a Freedom of Information Act request, not from any demand from Obama -- and the Washington Examiner reports that the Pentagon asked Israel to review the document before releasing it.Media Matters also noted that the Bush administration released information about Israel's nuclear program, and we don't recall Farah getting bent out of shape over that.

In the column proper, Farah listed things he claimed prove Barack Obama's (remember, Farah doesn't consider Obama to be the president) "latent anti-Semitism," and he piles up more lies:

-- "Obama used taxpayer money, his own political operatives and a nonprofit front group to interfere in the recent Israeli election, specifically with the intent of toppling Benjamin Netanyahu as prime minister." As we've documented, none of the evidence WND's Aaron Klein compiled actually prove any of that happened as Farah describes, and Klein's focus on former Obama operatives working for the opposition ignores the fact that Republican operatives were working for Netanyahu's campaign.

-- "Obama’s anti-Israel bent has been palpable since his first full day in office – Jan. 21, 2009 – when he gathered his new national-security team in the Oval Office and laid out a tough new policy toward Israel. ... Obama’s White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel famously told Abe Foxman in a private meeting: 'This is Israel’s moment of truth. This president is determined to make peace between Israel and the Arabs.'" Funny, this sounds almost exactly -- like, almost to the word -- what noted Obama-hater and fabulist Ed Klein wrote in his book "The Amateur":

he Jewish problem with Obama can be traced back to his first full day on the job. On January 21, 2009, he summoned his national security team to the Oval Office and laid out a tough new policy toward Israel.

[...]

However, a clue to the president’s true intentions came in March 2009, when Abe Foxman, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, met with the president’s then chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

“This is Israel’s moment of truth,” Emanuel told Foxman. “This President is determined to make peace between Israel and the Arabs.”

For this example, Farah is actually less of a liar and more of a plagiarist.

-- "Then came Obama’s even more famous call for a return to Israel’s pre-1967 borders – which more accurately should be termed 'Auschwitz borders.'" In fact, Obama said negotiations over a Palestinian state should start with the 1967 borders, not end there -- which has been the starting point for the past several presidents.

Farah harrumphed at the end of his column: "He looks like an anti-Semite. He walks like an anti-Semite. And he talks like an anti-Semite. I am forced to conclude there’s a malignant anti-Semite in the White House. It’s time for Jews who have been reflexively supporting him for too long to see if for themselves."

Meanwhile, we are forced to conclude that a malignant liar runs WND. No wonder nobody believes them.

Usually, it's fringe outlets like WorldNetDaily who spend way too much time freaking out about yoga being some sort of secret sinister religious practice. Apparently, the Media Research Center has decided it wants in on some of that action.

Matthew Balan had to go pretty far afield to get outraged in a March 28 item -- specifically, to a article in Quartz, "an online magazine from the parent company of The Atlantic," that turned a spotlight on "yogaphobic" Christians. Balan complained that the article's author -- a professor at "Indiana University-Perdue [sic] University Indianapolis" -- used a "left-leaning/pro-yoga spin," as if yoga someone turns people liberal.

After highlighting that the article noted criticism of yoga by Catholic officials, Balan sneered, "In other words, how care the Catholic Church point out how non-Christian religious practice can be dangerous for the spiritual health of believers!"

Balan concluded by asking whether the article's author really thinks "Christians are going to end up persecuting Hindus because of supposed 'yogaphobia.'" The greater risk, arguably, is more uninformed articles like Balan's.

Leave it to George Zimmerman fanboy Jack Cashill to perpetuate Zimmerman's sense of victimhood.

In his March 25 WorldNetDaily column, Cashill praises the "unvarnished 13-minute interview with his attorney" Zimmerman released as a video (Cashill didn't note that the attorney who did the interview was his divorce attorney). Cashill didn't mention Zimmerman sort of likening himself to Anne Frank in that he claims to "still believe that people are truly good at heart" -- an odd thing to say for a man who's been arrested twice on domestic violence charges -- but that may be because Cashill thinks Zimmerman is really Tom Robinson, the black man falsely accused of raping a white girl in "To Kill A Mockingbird":

In their own minds, those on the left still see themselves as Atticus Finch standing outside the jailhouse, shotgun reluctantly in hand, protecting the “mockingbird” within.

Zimmerman knows better. He was that mockingbird. When he looked out and saw that mob calling for his head, he saw not the racists of old, but the liberals he used to think were his friends.

Of course, unlike Robinson, Zimmerman indisputably killed a person. But that's OK with Cashill because he likes it when people he doesn't like -- gays, blacks, abortion doctors -- are killed.

MRC Mad That Media Identified New Taco Bell Ad As Dystopian, Not CommieTopic: Media Research Center

It apparently was a slow day at the Media Research Center. How else to explain this March 26 item by Joseph Rossell:

Many in the liberal news media again demonstrated their inability (or unwillingness) to identify communism when they see it.

Fast food restaurant Taco Bell “pulled out all the stops” with its new ad released March 24, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Although the ad did not mention McDonald’s by name, The Daily Mail also said the video portrayed “McDonald’s as a communist dictatorship where boring breakfasts rule.”

However, several news outlets, including Associated Press, either failed to understand the nods to communism or simply ignored the connection. Only a few sources including The Hollywood Reporter noted that a new Taco Bell ad obviously “painted McDonald's as a communist state.”

Yes, that's the whole point of Rossell's item: that some media outlets didn't refer to the imagery in the Taco Bell ad as communist, obviously because they are "liberal."

Rossell complains that some outlets likened the imagery to the dystopias of "The Hunger Games" and "Divergent," sneering that those were merely allusions to "pop culture." But he doesn't explain why communism is the only possible correct answer for the imagery inspiration.

If the MRC's anti-media argument has descended to being not politically correct enough to identify the right dystopia in a Taco Bell ad, maybe it was never that strong in the first place.

Last week, as I have for the last many years going back to the Clinton administration, referred to Bill and Hillary as the Bonnie and Clyde of American politics. Given the events of the last week, and watching Bonnie’s offensive and criminally motivated demeanor at her recent press conference at the United Nations Tuesday, where she spun a number of topics including her so-called missing emails, I feel compelled to coin a new and more apt name for her: “the Wicked Witch of the Left.”

I think you are a benevolent, insidious, sexualist, sexist racist. I mean that in the nicest of ways. In fact, based upon your own definitions, I think that might be a compliment to you. I am not even sure anymore because it all depends on what the definition of the word “is” is.

Why do the American people need access to all of Hillary Clinton’s emails as secretary of state?

Because there’s already ample evidence she used her office to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars for the Clinton Foundation, which pays most of her bills and allows her to live like the queen of England.

Now, let me nominate a woman who should go down as the very worst government employee in U.S. history. Her name is Hillary Clinton. Her claim to fame is that she married a charismatic politician and rode his coattails to the White House, to a seat in the U.S. Senate and to the job of secretary of state.

Hillary Clinton recently gave a speech and joked, in the context of the email scandal, that she needs a “new beginning” with the press. Right on, Ms. Hillary does need a new beginning: to be sent to prison.

The average price of a pound of ground beef climbed to another record high in February, hitting $4.238 per pound, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

In August 2014, the average price for a pound of all types of ground beef topped $4 for the first time, hitting $4.013, according to the BLS.

But as she with a similar story last month, Meyer failed to explain why ground beef prices are high: a years-long drought in Texas and the Midwest that shrank the U.S. cattle herd in 2014 to its smallest size since 1952.

Candidly, I don’t have the time right now to be writing an article that most in the West would ignore or repudiate. I wrote this piece, however, for the staff of WND with whom I have consulted over the years. WND is one of the few news organizations in America that is interested in truth, and unconcerned with the consequences of reporting it. I admire that, and so should you. Few news organizations remain that are not just inundating us with misinformation and propaganda. But I digress.

We are at the precipice of war, and this is a call to action. While it might not come tomorrow, the threat does grow by the day as conflict between the largest and most powerful nation states becomes inevitable, driven by the impending implosion of the empire of debt accumulated by Western democracies, and by the yearning of Russia and China (and their surrogates) to escape the constraints of almost 70 years of American hegemony.

I am not talking about another one-sided skirmish in the desert, but rather a real war, where satellites fall from the sky, ships sink, supply chains are disrupted and there is a loss of life not seen since the last century; a war of such a magnitude that few Westerners alive today can comprehend it. Such a war will alter the world as we know it. And, reading the tea leaves, it seems there is little we could do now to stop it. At this stage, all that is missing is the spark that ignites the inferno. It might come tomorrow, it might delay a while longer. We can prepare, but preparation takes years and years, and requires a threshold level of certainty that the threat exists, that it merits attention, that it demands action.

A lot of ranting about "the coming financial collapse" follows, peppered with things like, "If you question my advice, then tell me, why did Mr. Jamie Dimon buy an island? Or why does Hank Paulson actually live on one? Or what about James Cameron, who up and moved to New Zealand?" Barrett concludes: "You have been warned. Recalibrate your mindset. Now prepare."

Funny thing about that whole "rich people fleeing the country," though. Former WND financial columnist Porter Stansberry did pretty much the same "coming financial collapse" rant five years ago, complete with bragging about how he's prepared to flee the country at a moment's notice:

I'm built for pleasure, not for fighting. So I've simply designed an "escape pod." I have a nice boat on the dock right behind my house in Miami. I can safely leave the country -- at any time -- with most of my wealth, within 24 hours. I'm building a house on the water in a safe foreign country that doesn't have any ties to America (Nicaragua). I've moved a significant amount of my savings out of the country -- legally. I'm pursuing a diplomatic passport to ensure any attempt to restrict travel out of the country won't stop me.

Given that Stansberry is involved with dubious financial schemes that have netted him a $1.5 million sanction from the Securities and Exchange Commission, his desire for an "escape pod" is probably not driven by the state of the U.S. economy.

People magazine exploited the “transgender journey” of 65-year-old Olympic legend Bruce Jenner, exaggerating a family split that seems to be more about his divorce than his gender confusion (although they’re quite related, surely). This family is in television, so they can’t afford to look “transphobic.”

People felt compelled to announce it would acknowledge physical reality, but bow to political correctness: "In keeping with advice from experts, PEOPLE is taking its cues from Jenner's family in regard to the use of male pronouns." No one skeptical of “gender journeys” is allowed to speak.

Graham didn't explain why any article about Jenner's transgender journey must include someone trashing him. The haters can easily to to right-wing outlets like WorldNetDaily to get their fill of hate.

Following in the footsteps of The New York Times Magazine in 2012 and Slate.com in 2013, the March 30 edition of Time is promoting the photographs of Lindsay Morris. The headline was "Happy Campers: Documenting a rural retreat for gender-creative kids.” As opposed to most children, who are apparently “gender-stodgy.”

Morris is coming out with a book titled You Are You in which they call these children “gender-unique.” The book blurb says through “sensitive images the viewer will experience an important moment in history where the first gender-creative childhood is being openly expressed with the support of friends and family. Morris reaches beyond the confines of the camp to contribute to a dialog about the crucial role that support plays in the lives of gender unique children.”

Of course, applying the "gender-stodgy" label to Graham would be redundant since he more accurately fits under a different one: transphobic.

In an apparent bid to balance his hate, Graham engaged in a Twitter hissy fit over Expedia featuring a same-sex couple in a promotion giving away a "romantic getaway to Great Britain." Graham sneered, "Gay romance 'promoted by Expedia,' all right."

The anti-gayagenda of Graham and the MRC is so kneejerk that they run the risk of nobody paying attention as they slide further to the wrong side of history.

When I first saw this report, I really thought it was an early April Fools’ Day joke.

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, removed Iran and Hezbollah from the list of world terrorist threats.

The report has been sent to the U.S. Senate, where it should be renounced in the strongest terms possible and publicly rejected.

As we documented when NewsBusters' Tom Blumer, Clapper does not control the official list of what the U.S. considers terrorist threats -- the State Department does, and it still lists Iran and Hezbollah -- and any omissions to that effect in the DNI report means nothing in that regard.

But Farah is an inveterateliar, so nobody expects the truth from him anyway -- which would seem to be a strange position for someone who operates a "news" website to be in.

So, what is this "gay porn outlet" Obama gave an interview to? The Huffington Post. No, really.

Kincaid names various random articles on sex that HuffPo has run, adding that "Peter LaBarbera of Americans for Truth notes that The Huffington Post’s 'Gay Voices' section has run a video of movie scenes with full-frontal male nudity." And that's all the evidence Kincaid cites to justify calling HuffPo a "gay porn outlet."

Kincaid's piece also appears at BarbWire, the rabidly homophobic website operated by professional gay-basher Matt Barber.

Kincaid conludes by writing of HuffPo: "One has to wonder if the editors realize how ridiculous their bias makes them look." One has to wonder if AIM president Don Irvine realizes how ridiculous Kincaid makes his organization looks.

It's a general accepted legal principle that the dead can't be libeled. WorldNetDaily takes full advantage of that in an unbylined March 24 article that simply makes up things about Margaret Sanger:

Barack Obama says a little girl wrote to him asking why there were no women’s faces on U.S. currency.

That started a movement by a group called Women on 20s, which is now conducting an Internet poll on which of 15 candidates should be the first to replace President Andrew Jackson, ironically the founder of Obama’s party.

But creating the biggest stir on the list of candidates is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, a eugenicist who advocated aborting as many black babies as possible for the benefit of society.

In Sanger’s book, “Pivot of Civilization,” she characterized African-Americans and immigrants as “human weeds,” “reckless breeders” and “spawning … human beings who never should have been born.”

WND's claim that Sanger "advocated aborting as many black babies as possible for the benefit of society" is an out-and-out lie, since Sanger never advocated abortion for anyone -- she considered it a "horror."

While Sanger held eugenicist views that were unfortunately popular in her day, those views were not racially driven. Planned Parenthood notes that Sanger's advocacy of family planning ran against the views of some eugenicists who believed that healthy and "fit" women should have as many children as possible.

Further, WND is simply making up quotes from Sanger's "Pivot of Civilization." The terms "human weeds" and "reckless breeders" appear nowhere in the book, and their approximate substitutes are taken out of context.

A search of the text of "Pivot of Civilization" shows that three of the four references to "weed" refers to child laborers removing weeds in beet fields. The fourth is a quote of another researcher highlighting " the ruthless struggle for existence in China" because of its poverty and high birth rate, adding that" Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined weaklings."

The book does attack "reckless" breeding, but Sanger does not specifically single out "African-Americans and immigrants" as such -- indded, there are two mentions of the word "Negro" (the preferred term at the time for African-Americans) in the entire book. And the word "immigrant" appears only once in the book,

By contrast, Sanger spends much more time fretting over native white Americans -- "pure American stock," as she quotes another writer calling them -- who aspire to nothing more than having children and working in farm fields.

Sanger's statement about "children who never should have been born," therefore, has nothing to do with blacks or immigrants. And the closest the word "spawning" appears to that direct phrase in the book is in chapters 3; the "children who never should have been born" phrase appears in chapter 4.

WND has simply decided to make up stuff about Sanger. But we're sadly used to WND makingupstuff.

NEW ARTICLE: The MRC's Blind Eye To Right-Wing Journalistic MisdeedsTopic: Media Research Center
The Media Research Center couldn't scream loud enough over Brian Williams' exaggerations. But when Bill O'Reilly and other right-wing journalists are caught in similar exaggerations, the MRC doesn't want to hear about it. Read more >>

Lee Hieb -- the fringe AAPS-linked doctor and WorldNetDaily fave who's already on record spouting dubious medical claims and outright lying about statistics involving vaccines -- is back at it in a March 22 WND article by Paul Bremmer, in which she blames Obamacare for an allegedly increased rate in the closing of rural hospitals because Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements to doctors and hospitals have been cut under the Affordable Care Act. She doesn't hesitate to go Godwin:

“Up until now, hospitals have failed and succeeded, they’ve come and gone just like businesses,” Hieb said. “Some are better-run than others, but the economic deck was not totally stacked against them. Now, unfortunately, the economic deck is stacked against them in such a way that, universally, smaller hospitals are disenfranchised.”

Dr. Hieb went so far as to compare the shuttering of rural hospitals to the infamous Reichstag fire, which some believe was a false flag attack by Nazi Germany.

“This is going to be like the Reichstag fire,” Hieb proclaimed. “It’s going to be an excuse to say, ‘Look, the free market failed, and now we can go in and institute universal health care, because you see, these people in these rural areas need healthcare, and you’re not getting it to them.’

Yes, she really did liken Obamacare to the Reichstag fire.

But if one reads the Washington Post article that inspired Bremmer's item and Hieb's rant, the answer is much more complicated, and no single cause can be blamed. But one of the causes is the refusal of some states to to expand state Medicaid programs in the face of federal cutbacks:

Experts and practitioners cite declining federal reimbursements for hospitals under the Affordable Care Act as the principal reasons for the recent closures. Besides cutting back on Medicare, the law reduced payments to hospitals for the uninsured, a decision based on the assumption that states would expand their Medicaid programs. However, almost two dozen states have refused to do so. In addition, additional Medicare cuts caused by a budget disagreement in Congress have hurt hospitals’ bottom lines.

But rural hospitals also suffer from multiple endemic disadvantages that drive down profit margins and make it virtually impossible to achieve economies of scale.

These include declining populations; disproportionate numbers of elderly and uninsured patients; the frequent need to pay doctors better than top dollar to get them to work in the hinterlands; the cost of expensive equipment that is necessary but frequently underused; the inability to provide lucrative specialty services and treatments; and an emphasis on emergency and urgent care, chronic money-losers.

[...]

Rural hospitals took a second hit from the health law’s reductions in special Medicaid payments to hospitals with large numbers of indigent and uninsured patients. Federal officials made the cuts assuming that most states would embrace the Medicaid expansion envisioned in the law, thus sharply reducing their number of uninsured. But 23 states, including Texas, have declined to do so.

But, apparently, it's easier to play the ol' Nazi card than it is to do any actual research.

The Media Research Center's Scott Whitlock grumbles in a March 22 NewsBusters post:

On Sunday, 60 Minutes devoted 12 minutes towards fawning over celebrity scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson. Yet, the Charlie Rose-hosted segment never mentioned his repeated fake quotes, including a slam against George W. Bush that Tyson repeated for years. Instead, Rose fawned that the TV personality has followed “Carl Sagan as the country's most captivating scientific communicator.”

Whitlock might have a point if, the very next day, the MRC's Matthew Balan hadn't devoted a post to another segment from that same edition of "60 Minutes," in which "Lara Logan refreshingly brought new attention to the plight of the ancient Christian communities in Iraq on Sunday's 60 Minutes, as they face annihilation by ISIS."

Nowhere does Balan mention that Logan spent several months suspended from her "60 Minutes" correspondent job after a report featuring "an actual eyewitness of the attack" on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya; it was later revealed that the purported eyewitness, Dylan Davies -- who went by the pseudonym "Morgan Jones" -- told authorities he didn't witness the attack. Logan also failed to disclose a book by Davies was published by a division of CBS, which airs "60 Minutes." The publisher pulled Davies' book from the shelves.

If you'll recall, the MRC studiously ignored Logan's bad reporting, even though "60 Minutes" is a prime MRC target, because Logan was supporting the cause of perpetuating Benghazi as a right-wing cudgel against the Obama adminstration.